A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
HP Enterprise Services
Cloud Unleashes the Power of Creativity
Steve Poehlein
These are exciting times in media and entertainment as the industry continually pushes the boundaries of the viewer experience, from increasingly complex computer effects and animation to motion capture and 3D viewing, and extending to new mobile and social media applications.
Media and entertainment companies continuously need to move huge, rich data files around the globe to make all of this “magic” happen. And that’s not just within their own organization or distribution medium, but more and more with third-party creative partners—from color correction to sound editing to video touchup—that need to come together at a moment’s notice.
"Cloud lets filmmakers, animators, publishers, broadcasters focus on producing entertaining, creative, and immersive experiences"
Cloud provides the agility needed for producing, managing, and distributing next-generation digital content—not just for storage and transport, but also now for rendering, encoding, transcoding and editing. It offers a more cost-efficient way to create, collaborate on, manage, access, and archive this content.
And it provides those capabilities in a collaborative, secured, and controlled environment.
What does Cloud do for Media and Entertainment?
Cloud provides numerous opportunities to drive business value for media and entertainment companies. It does this through:
• Productivity
—enabling media and entertainment companies to focus on developing their core business and reduce the diversion of technical resources to IT support organizations and facilities
• Agility
—quickly adapting to changing production demands as well as seasonal or event-driven consumption activities
• Flexibility
—providing the right level of infrastructure and software that can adapt to both the content creators’ and distributors’ needs
• Scalability
—adding and decreasing capacity as production volumes change
• Reliability
—housing production data in strong, stable, and secure facilities Cloud lets filmmakers, animators, publishers, broadcasters, and other media and entertainment companies focus on what they do best—produce entertaining, creative, and immersive experiences for their customers. But companies should follow three rules to successfully implement it.
Three Rules for Implementing Cloud in Media and Entertainment
In working with our media and entertainment clients, HP has found that success comes from following three rules:
1. Keep your options open.
2. Seek comprehensive implementation.
3. Ensure the security of your creative content.
Rule 1: Keep your options open
Media and entertainment is a broad and expanding stage. And every player is unique. Therefore, cloud solutions should be tailored to meet the specific demands of each business by leveraging the most appropriate aspects of private and public cloud architectures, as well as legacy IT investments.
Rule 2: Seek comprehensive implementation
Moving to a cloud environment takes time and must be done right. Once the direction and vision is in place, a comprehensive approach should be mapped out in a quarter-by-quarter adoption and maturity plan. Cloud delivers wide-ranging benefits to the media and entertainment enterprise, but it must be blended with existing infrastructure and software assets. The migration needs a comprehensive approach for implementation that meets the requirements of the business.
Rule 3: Ensure the security of your creative content
Given industry concerns over content piracy, companies require comprehensive solutions for securing their intellectual and creative property. Only management and security solutions that span information, applications, and infrastructure can ensure that the cloud is safe.
The Cloud is Helping DreamWorks Animation Innovate Content Creation Our strategic alliance with DreamWorks Animation provides a good example of how cloud delivers rendering power to computer-generated animated film production. DreamWorks Animation pushes the limits of what is visually possible with every new film. But as artists envision more stunning effects, rendering requirements test the studio’s computing capacity.
The DreamWorks Animation film “Turbo,” for example, required 75 million render hours to create fully realized images, including 32 Indy 500 race cars and 32 million crowd character instances, the most of any of its films at the time. DreamWorks Animation requires their technology resources to have the flexibility to meet the needs of their artists in order to deliver a digitally stunning movie and keep production progressing on the 10 films in their pipeline.
With a flexible, hosted compute solution from HP Enterprise Services, DreamWorks Animation has the high-performance computing power to get dynamic capacity when they need it. For instance, over the course of the production cycle, 12% of “Turbo” was rendered in the cloud. With HP, DreamWorks Animation found a cloud solution that works best for their needs and helps avoid a costly data center expansion. It has the agility and flexibility to deliver storage, compute, and resources in a way that can quickly meet demand and capacity.
DreamWorks Animation now says “yes” to more films, more delighted audiences, and even greater IT optimization. With easy, on-demand scalability, DreamWorks Animation can rapidly adjust to satisfy dynamic storage needs and focus on what they do best—making amazing animated films.
